SCHOLARSHIP

from U.S. News and World
Report, 22 March 1999, pp. 58-9

The life of the mind goes digital

All shuffle there; all cough in ink," W. B. Yeats once observed of
scholars at their trade. Today, the poet might say, they cough in Email.
More and more of those engaged in the life of the mind, artists as well as
intellectuals, find E-mail almost unavoidable both as a means of
communication and, increasingly, as a subject of study.

But because they are contentious souls, few of them agree about what
the E-mail examined life means, or even whether it's a good thing. Take
the simple fact that 70 to 80 percent of American university faculty now
use electronic messages to communicate with students and colleagues. To
many, that's only a boon, encouraging greater intellectual exchange and
pedagogical irmovations (such as student-constructed Web sites instead of
papers). To others, even to some of its partisans, Email can be a
disembodied horror, threatening not just privacy and intellectual
community but literacy itself.

Few scholars have taken a longer view of the mixed blessings of
electronic scholarship than classics professor James J. O'Donnell of the
University of Pennsylvania. His generally optimistic perspective, set
forth in his 1998
book Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, is echoed in
his work as the university's vice provost for information systems and
computing. That might sound as though a bookbound humanist has usurped the
technogeek's chair, but O'Donnell says his classical training provides
valuable insight into
controversies surrounding new forms of communication. "After all, Plato
mistrusted the written word," he says. "You have to accept that
technological advances present risks and opportu nities and try to make
the most of the latter."

An early convert to the computer, O'Donnell helped launch one of the
first online humamities journals in 1990. Four years later he added an
electronic listserv to his course on St. Augustine, enabling students as
far away as Hong Kong to audit. Now he comes up with new ways to use
computers to enhance academic and community life.

But isn't something lost when, as many students report, even roommates
communicate via E-mail? Possibly, says Gillian Weiss, a graduate history
student at Stanford. She counts it a loss that "the library and the
department of flee are now less social spaces." Yet that doesn't outweigh
the benefits of access to history-oriented listservs, or to professors she
wouldn't approach "if I
had to do it in person."

"What the Internet is doing is providing something like the
coffeehouses of Vienna," says poet and University of Texas professor of
humanities Frederick Turner. He uses the computer to chat regularly with
about 30 scholars around the world who share his eclectic interests. But
the electronic salon has its drawbacks. "The sheer volume is
overwhelming," he says. "And you can't leave
the coffeehouse and go home to private reflection."

That raises the question of what all those words buzzing back and forth
are really doing to the life of the mind. "I don't want to sound like a
Luddite," says critic and biographer James Atlas, But it's a fact that
E-mail is going to change the way the writing life is recorded." Atlas
believes that in the future
writers maybecome more careful about keeping their letter-displacing
E-correspondence. Moreover, he has grave doubts about the quality of
reflection that goes into E-mail: "When you sit down to write a letter,
you are making a more serious commitment."

All is not gloom and doom on this point, however. Reynolds Price, the
novelist and Duke University professor of English, differs with those who
claim that E-mail's immediacy is destroying the art of prose. "It's not as
though it fell from some great recent height," says Price, who applauds
the fact that young
people are writing more these days, "even if many don't seem to realize
it."

Questions about the literary worth of Email may quickly be eclipsed by
ones about how to store it. Consider just one object of historical
concern: the U.S. government, which sends and receives millions of
messages a day. Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security
Archive, helped to prevent every
White House since Ronald Reagan's from destroying its E-mail. Thanks to
Blanton and other activists, the National Archives will issue guidelines
for E-mail preservation to all federal agencies at the end of this month.
Of course, with the gigaheaps of data quickly mounting, scholars may find
that too much
documentation can be as maddening as too little.